Global luxury-goods

Middle Blingdom

Despite declines in sales to Japanese and European shoppers last year, the global luxury-goods market grew in 2013 to reach almost 220 billion euros ($300 billion). Chinese are still the world’s keenest buyers of bling, accounting for about 29% of total global spending last year, but an ongoing anti-corruption campaign has greatly dampened sales at home. Sales growth on the mainland slowed to just 2% in 2013, down from 7% a year earlier. But the binge continued elsewhere, as some two-thirds of luxury purchases by Chinese last year were outside of the mainland. And not all in nearby Hong Kong or Macau either: a fifth of those Chinese purchases were made in Europe. Over a third of all luxury sales last year took place on the old continent, home to many of the world’s most famous purveyors of luxury goods, even though Europeans themselves made up only a fifth of global sales. (See article on Chinese consumers from our weekly edition.)